Give Fork's a unique title initially" (Fork of) ___

[tomlarkworthy]

I use forks to atomically merge changes into a prod notebook. However, in about 70% of the time I get confused which is the original and which is the fork, sometimes with disastrous results. Here is my activity chart of a typical "Patch a prod notebook"

Could you tell which ones were the fork and which were prod?

It's confusing in a few other places beyond the activity feed, like the browser tab. Forks could be given a name like "(Fork of) Login with comment" until the title is explicitly updated. Note I deliberately but the parenthesis first so the browser tab would be distinguishable.

This would be like the OS behaviour when you copy a file, it appends (Copy of)

[mootari]

For what it's worth, as a workaround you could add a user style like

@-moz-document url("https://observablehq.com/") {
  .listing-grid + div + div.relative > a[href^="/d/"] {
     position: relative;
  }
  .listing-grid + div + div.relative > a[href^="/d/"]:after {
    content: attr(href);
    position: absolute;
    bottom: 2px;
    font: 500 var(--font-size-7) var(--sans-serif);
    color: var(--gray);
    left: calc(16px + 24px + var(--spacing-small));
    width: auto;
  }
}

which would give you

[tomlarkworthy]

note my team member actually raised a support ticket because I trashed a fork and they thought it was real

[mootari]

because I trashed a fork and they thought it was real

Somewhat related: Allow read-only interaction with notebooks in trash

[tophtucker]

One complication is that if your fork is intended as a suggestion, it doesn’t make sense to default to suggesting renaming the parent to “Fork of…”.

And I don’t think we could change the title without 2 new history events, so if you forked and immediately compared it’d prompt you to merge 2 changes.

(There are possible solutions to all of this; just thinking out loud…)

In general we have a recurring issue of “trivial forks”. People sometimes trend on the Explore page for forking someone else’s notebook and making no edits. So one way of thinking about it is that notebook listing representations should aspire to communicate something of the weight or heft or significance of a notebook, though various cues…